Now that the infographic craze has saturated us with new visual knowledge (and marketing gimmicks), something interesting has happened: The creation of infographics has become democratized. No longer is the act of creating a visual data story confined to professional designers using professional tools like Adobe Illustrator or Photoshop. Now anyone with a data set can build an infographic.

(See also 5 Business & Design Tools Every Tech Freelancer Should Learn.)

Trust me when I say that with these tools, you don’t have to be a designer to create a high-quality, effective infographic. Does this mean there’s no place for professional designers and data? Not at all. Uniqueness and customization will always carry a premium (as Column Five can attest), but there are plenty of instances where a prefab or low-cost alternative can be mighty useful.

With that in mind, I’ve cobbled together a list of five services/methods that even non-designers can use to create or commission great infographics.

Infogr.am: All The Bells And Whistles

Infogr.am is free, and free is good. It’s a popular platform that has seen more than 800,000 infographics created to-date. Infogr.am is nice and simple, but the features it does have are power-packed. For instance, you can make more than 30 different types of charts (compared to 11 in Excel). Speaking of Excel, Infogr.am’s built-in spreadsheet editor makes editing data easy and enables importing of XLS and CSV files.

One of its best features is the ability to download files in PNG or PDF format. This is perfect for including the infographic in a presentation or emailing itto a colleague. Many people will like the fact that you can publish your infographic online, which makes it sharable and embeddable. If your data is sensitive, give it a password and a private link.

Infogr.am is far and away my favorite online infographics editor.

InfoActive: Interactive, Live And Mobile-Friendly

Of all the infographic tools that claim to make data “fun,” (there are more than you’d think), InfoActive – now in beta testing - probably comes closest to delivering on the promise. It’s unique features – including interactivity and live data - make it seem more “up-to-date” than the competition.

The platform lets you visualize data that isn’t just static - a big plus in today’s environment where people want to become part of the story. The addition of embedding live data is important given how quickly information can become outdated. The InfoActive website phrases it like this: “Hitting ‘publish’ isn’t the end of the story; it’s just the beginning.”

Simplicity is a core feature here: the InfoActive site boasts that you don’t even need a tutorial to get started. No word yet on what, if anything, InfoActive will cost post-beta.

Piktochart: Drag-And-Drop Templates Galore

For $29 a month, Piktochart gives you access to a WYSIWYG editor that will let you drag and drop elements to create an infographic. Some 300,000 users strong, including clients such as Harvard University, Red Bull and GE, Piktochart has built that following on the back of more than 90 included themes. But from a design standpoint, many of those themes are decent, but others are mundane or downright bad.

As with Infogr.am, you can share your creations via social networks or download print-quality files. If you like the Piktochart editor - which is free to try - you may find the service worth paying for. One nice bonus: In the latest version, Piktochart lets users create search friendly graphics!

Easel.ly: Theme-Based Drag-And-Drop With Objects

Like InfoActive, Easel.ly is currently in beta. Easel.ly also takes a theme-based, drag-and-drop WYSIWYG approach to infographic creation, but it comes loaded with a modest selection of just 10 “vhemes” (visual themes).

Easel.ly sets itself apart by making it easy to insert a selection of objects from categories as varied as people, banners, icons, animals and nature (among others).

While the current theme selection is a bit limited, people who enjoy the platform and interface can completely customize their infographics through the upload feature.

Many Eyes V2: Pre-Made Visualization Filters

While there are no themes in the new (beta) version of IBM’s Many Eyes, there are 11 different ways to visualize data, many of which you won’t find on the other platforms and services listed here. These visualization features let you go beyond pie charts to harness the power of word trees, heat maps, tree maps and yes, the infamous word cloud.

It all starts by uploading a data set (or selecting one from the site, though many are basically useless at the moment) and then simply applying a visualization style. The visualizations can be broken down into three categories: Compare A Set Of Values Track Rises And Falls Over Time See Parts Of A Whole

One of the coolest options is the View In Context visualization, a type of line graph that shows changes in data over a long set of intervals (like time, for example).

Note that the output of Many Eyes might not technically qualify as an infographic all by itself. But it’s a great tool to add variety to other offerings, like Infogr.am.

Lead image courtesy of Shutterstock. 

(See also Expectations Lowered For Apple's Big Developers Conference - WWDC.)

On Monday, meanwhile, the company released the official WWDC app for iOS devices, which features a slightly "flattened" design that's heavy on black and white and light on textures and shadows. The app's design lends credence to rumors that iOS 7 will move away from skeuomorphic design trends toward a simpler flat appearance. (A skeuomoprhic design mimics real-world materials - for example, the virtual leather grain binding in the current iCal app.)

(See also Forget Skeuomorphism: The (Digital) World Is Getting Flatter.)

Apple has already announced it will preview the next generations of its iOS and OS X operating systems at the conference. The company is also rumored to be working on refreshed MacBook Pro laptops, possibly featuring Intel's new 'Haswell' processors, for launch during the keynote address June 10 in San Francisco.

Lining Up The Big Three For iRadio

On the streaming music front, Apple inked a licensing deal with Universal Music last month, and is still negotiating with Sony, presumably to have all three of the music industry's largest companies on board for a WWDC iRadio launch. While the Universal deal covers only recorded music, the Warner agreement is said to span recordings and publishing rights, and Apple is reportedly in talks with both arms of Sony's music business. Sources for both CNET and The New York Times have said that Apple will be paying per-stream and royalty rates at least on par with, if not higher than, what Pandora pays music companies in its licensing arrangements.

Perhaps the most popular of current internet radio services, Pandora counts some 70 million active users. Apple, meanwhile, has registered more than 500 million iTunes accounts. Apple reportedly tried to leverage its massive user base to negotiate cheaper licensing arrangements than Pandora's, but the music labels balked. Reports say that Apple plans to build advertising into its radio service in order to drive additional revenues - which will be shared with the music companies.

(See Also: Tim Cook on Apple's 'Very Grand' Vision for TV, Wearable Tech & Much More) 

Thinner 13" MacBook Pro?

Noted Apple analyst Ming-Chi Kuo of KGI Securities has published his forecast for WWDC, highlighting expectations of a refreshed 13-inch MacBook Pro with retina display. According to a 9to5Mac report, Kuo expects the updated model to feature Intel's new Haswell chips in a slightly slimmer industrial design with an upgraded 1080p resolution webcam. The current 15-inch MacBook Pro retina is actually a bit slimmer than its little brother; it could be that Apple is prepping a  13-inch model that matches the thickness of the current 15-inch machine.

Kuo also predicts a refresh to the MacBook Air line using the dual-microphone setup employed by the current MacBook Pros. The two-microphone array allows for advanced noise cancellation techniques to enhance FaceTime calls and other voice applications. Better voice recognition would, of course, be key to incorporating the voice-activated Siri service, should Apple choose to bring such functionality to the Mac. 

Stay tuned to ReadWrite for the latest on what to expect at Apple's WWDC. 

WWDC app acreenshots via iTunes.com.

What if designers worried about digit size instead?

Luke Wroblewski, a respected designer who sold a company to Twitter and more recently founded Polar, an app maker, thinks it's time to reconsider mobile design principles. Instead of worrying about questions like whether to upsize smartphone apps for tablets, designers should start by asking how their users will physically interact with their devices when using an app.

The technical term for this is input type—keyboard versus touchscreen, one-handed or two-handed interactions, and the like. This requires designers to think about how a device is held, which fingers are used, and how the app in question can optimize the experience for users' dexterity. 

The Beginning: Start With Responsive Design

For a smartphone, the primary input type has become a single hand with a single finger, typically the thumb. For tablets, it's two hands with two inputs, typically both thumbs. And for desktops, it's still restricted largely to the mouse, trackpad, and keyboard, but can branch out in rare circumstances, in the case of devices like the Chromebook Pixel or Microsoft Surface to touchscreen inputs as well. 

Wroblewski's Polar makes an iOS app that lets users poll friends on any topic and then build communities around these topics. Just last week, Polar launched a desktop Web client that is designed to match not just the look but the functionality of the mobile app versions and the input types taken into account with each one. As you change the size of your window, the app morphs from the desktop version to the tablet/touchscreen computer version, and then down to its smartphone version.

If you resize ReadWrite in a browser window, you'll see a similar transformation. This is known as responsive design, and it's an increasingly popular approach to Web design. Last week, at its I/O conference, Google unveiled tools that promise to make it much easier to build responsive websites.

That way, Polar not only looks the same in-app for the iPhone and iPad as it does on the mobile Web, but it adapts for pretty much every platform for optimal use. It's not about scaling the layout of interface objects up and down; it's about scaling the whole experience up or down. 

Next: Think About How We Hold Our Devices

But responsive design has largely been limited to these screen-size adjustments. Input type may be an even more important concept because it factors in both the physical limitations of the device from a display and functionality standpoint as well as how those limitations translate to our physical interactions with the devices. 

Wroblewski detailed the input-type approach to design in a blog post on May 13 that covered the app's new Web client, which lets users quickly scroll through and vote on topic pages related to everything from Star Wars and Game of Thrones to Web design and photography.

"Topic pages on Polar were designed to adapt to not only different screen sizes but to different input types as well," Wroblewski writes. "The end result is a Web interface that aims to fit into the reality of Web use today. In particular, the human ergonomics of how people interact with different devices ..."

It turns out that thinking about ergonomics on mobile devices and adapting design accordingly is not a widely used approach. Steven Hoober, who Wroblewski cites as his primary source for input-type research, published a report earlier this year on UXmatters, "How Do Users Really Hold Mobile Devices?" that collected two months of observations on how more than 1,300 people used their mobile devices. 

Hoober's report aimed to dispel the myth that designers should follow a "best practices" approach to app design that relies on assumptions that cast the widest net. Instead, Hoober advises that the approach should be far more customized, taking into account the constantly changing nature of mobile use that is contingent on factors like device type and screen size as well as physical location, be it standing or sitting on a bus or in a cafe. 

"The way in which users hold their phone is not a static state," Hoober writes. "Users change the way they’re holding their phone very often—sometimes every few seconds."

While Hoober did verify the assumption that majority of smartphone use is done one-handed with the thumb—49% of the time—he also discovered that designing from that standpoint alone could lead users to alter their behavior and thus deemphasize the very reasons underlying the approach.

"What if a user sees buttons at the top, so switches to cradling his phone to more easily reach all functionality on the screen—or just prefers holding it that way all the time?" he explains.  

Comfort-First Approach

Wroblewski stresses that Polar was designed primarily to be "comfortable to use," incorporating the ideas behind Hoober's findings into the app's design to cover the best input types for every device.  

For instance, Polar's smartphone app contains no left-hand column because users wouldn't typically be able to access it comfortably using one hand and one finger. It does support keyboard use in the event someone is using a large-screen phone-tablet hybrid, also known as a phablet, that's more typically held with two hands.

By contrast, when using Polar on a full tablet, a browsing column is present to take advantage of two-handed use. That's placed strategically on the left edge, with voting options on the right to take advantage of quick thumb access to the left and right sides of the screen. 

The desktop version of Polar mostly matches the mobile app experience. The main difference: When Polar detects a large enough screen, it adds keyboard support.

This type of comfort-first approach has its downsides.

"Looking at the Polar interface on a laptop can be a bit disconcerting because we’ve essentially left the middle of the page 'blank,'" Wroblewski says. This runs contrary to the fill-'et-up instincts of most Web designers, but it's the only way Polar could create something that easily scales down both aesthetically and functionally from a 27-inch monitor to a 4-inch smartphone screen. 

While these methods are very much experimental, they showcase the implementation of a much more sophisticated approach for thinking about mobile app design. We know that the diversity of devices is only increasing. With responsive design, we've scrapped a one-size-fits-all approach to screen size. The next step is to discard one-swipe-fits-all thinking about how we interact with those screens.

Photo by Intel Free Press

Here's how it would play out: After an airline magazine declared 3D printers the next new thing, boss Michael Scott would buy one, install it in the office, and christen it by printing out a coffee cup. Ten hours later, after the cup was completed, Scott would hold the cup aloft as he outlined his vision of the future. Employees would watch silently as the hot coffee slowly distended the cup into a plastic teardrop, eventually rupturing and spilling scalding coffee all over Scott's lap.

Staples, Dunder-Mifflin's real-life competitor, undoubtedly has a different scenario in mind. But right now, that's about all most offices can hope to do with the $1,299 3D Systems' Cube 3D printer that Staples now offers. 

What Could A 3D Printer Do For An Office?

In all seriousness, 3D printers - which layer many tiny sheets of melted plastic on top of one another to build up the shape of a 3D object - have any number of possible applications. If you can work with a material strong enough, you can recreate virtually anything you'd like, from a plastic geegaw to, yes, even a gun. Car aficionado Jay Leno even uses them to create replacement auto parts.  

Manufacturing could use a 3D printer to "sketch out" parts. 3D gaming companies could print out 3D versions of their monsters for promotional use. Artisans can create objects that you can only imagine. If your business deals with the tangible, you might argue that you should have a 3D printer in your office.

(See also Just How Hard Is It To Get And Use A 3D Printer?)

But there's an argument to be made that 3D printing, in its present form, just isn't ready for general office use. And even if it was, the Cube 3D printer doesn't seem like the right device to break the 3D printing barrier.

With a few exceptions, today's 3D printing remains a hobbyist's tool, nothing more. I asked Staples to put me in touch with someone who could convince me of the need of a 3D printer as a general office tool. Instead, the company's public relations guy referred me to this sentence in the Staples press release: "For companies creating new products, 3D printing can make it easier to design and test new concepts, and decrease the time to market". 

Like what? Well, a restaurant could use a 3D printer to create new kitchen tools. Could you actually eat with those? Probably not.

Cube 3D: Locked Down And Complex

Even if you could come up with practical uses for a 3D printer, the Cube 3D printer might not be your best bet. While fairly easy to set up and use, a PCMag.com review of the Cube 3D found that of objects the site's reviewers tried to print - a Tardis, an owl, a teacup and others - success varied considerably: "About five were beautifully rendered; most of the rest were of decent quality though with some flaws, and about four were basically ruined," the site said. And that doesn't count a half-dozen aborted starts. 

Yes, you can print in either ABS or compostable PLA plastic, but just five inches to a side. And while some sample objects looked great, others looked covered in cobwebs. 

Neither the PCMag review nor an extensive CNET review revealed the printing times: on the order of two hours. CNET does, however, point out that the Cube requires online activation, can detect "third-party" print materials and requires leveling the print tray, applying glue to it, then soaking the print platform in water to remove the printed object. And that's if everything goes right.

Then there's the cost. $1,300 for a hobbyist's toy isn't cheap. And that's not counting the $50 per plastic cartridge holding 320 grams of material (0.7 pounds). Printing is expensive, whether it's 2D or 3D.

Perhaps feeling the competitive pressures that forced Office Max and Office Depot to merge: Staples seems to be looking for ways to entice customers into its stores. And being the first major retailer to stock 3D printers could help addressthat problem. For looky-loos and hobbyists, getting a first-hand look at 3D printing is a fascinating diversion - heck, you can even print out a doll and put your face on it. For general productivity, though, it's literally a waste of time of time and money.

(See also Why 3D Printing Will be The Next Big Copyright Fight.)

Lead image via Cubify

According to a report from Bloomberg, Apple’s lead designer, Sir Jonathan Ive, is completely revamping the look and feel of iOS. Ive had previously been the long-time head of hardware design at Apple (responsible for the physical look and feel of iMacs, iPods, iPads and the iPhone) but was elevated in 2012 when CEO Tim Cook let go Scott Forstall, the previous lead designer of iOS. Ive now controls the look and feel of just about every aspect of the iPhone.

With that change comes the end of skeuomorphism, the designconcept where developers make apps look like the physical object they represent. In iOS, this can be seen in the bookshelves of the Newsstand app or the paper notebook look of the Notes app.

Apple moving away from skeuomorphism is not news. The New York Times reported the move in November of last year, and the topic has been at the top of designers' minds for months. On Wednesday, Bloomberg confirmed that Ive and his cohorts are moving toward a flat design that does not digitally recreate physical objects with 3D renderings.

What is news is that Ive’s team have apparently fallen behind in finalizing the new designs that are supposed to be ready for iOS when Apple unveils it at its World Wide Developers Conference, slated for June 10-14 in San Francisco. According to the Bloomberg report, the design concepts were due in February but are running a month late. The Apple team is working under intense pressure to get the new look down before the next iPhone ships, likely in September or October of this year. 

See Also:

• Why Apple Really, Really Needs To Kill It With iOS 7
• Forget Skeuomorphism: The (Digital) World Is Getting Flatter
• Will Apple's New Design Approach Kill The Luster Steve Jobs Loved?
• Tim Cook Cleans House At Apple - Scott Forstall Is Out

Motivations For Flat Design

The flat design concept is in vogue with mobile designers because it provides a cleaner, crisper way to present information and easy interactive elements. Flat design works better on mobile screens, where inset text and spacing, among other issues, are concerns for developers. Microsoft’s Windows 8 and Windows Phone are prime examples of flat design.

A couple factors no doubt motivate Ive’s decision to transition iOS design:

• Apple is in desperate need of dramatic changes to make iOS 7 fresh and new for consumers. The basic digital design of iOS hasn't changed since the first iPhone was launched in 2007.
• Flat design is more conducive to high-resolution screens. The original iPhone had a resolution of 163 pixels per inch (ppi) on its 3.5-inch screen. The iPhone 5 has 326 ppi on a 4-inch screen. Competitive models like the Samsung Galaxy S4 (441 ppi) and HTC One (469 ppi) boast even higher resolutions that Apple will likely try to match or best with its newest iPhone. 

According to reports, the disagreement that led to Forstall's exit from Apple centered around skeumorphism vs. flat design. Now that Ive is in control of both hardware and software, he is going to bring everything into alignment with his own vision. 

Are you looking forward to a different design for your iPhone apps? Or are you happy with how your iPhone currently looks? Let us know in the comments. 

Ten years ago, many of ReadWrite's first readers first viewed the site on a CRT display attached to a desktop with a wired Ethernet connection, or via a clunky laptop perched across their knees near an early Wi-Fi router. The Web, then roughly a decade old, was still largely static and flat, excepting the occasional Java applet or Flash animation.

Unsurprisingly, ReadWrite's original design was itself also sort of static and flat, just like the rest of the then-nascent blogosphere. But the same way today's technology now allows our readers to pull up our posts and videos on hi-res tablets or smartphones with 4G wireless data connections, so has ReadWrite's design also evolved in line with changing Web aesthetics and the needs of our diverse audience of developers and technophiles.

What follows is a recap of how ReadWrite's design has evolved along with the Web through the years, via screenshots courtesy of the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine. (You can also check out a more personal tour ReadWrite founder Richard MacManus authored last year for our ninth anniversary.) Click on any of the images for a larger version.

Of course, ReadWrite's not done evolving. Check back regularly to catch the latest chapter in ReadWrite's visual design.

Year One: 2003, Part 1

Richard started his blog using a borrowed template from Dave Winer's Radio Userland, an early blogging service. Here's what a page from August 2003 looked like:

Year One: 2003, Part 2 

Richard soon followed up with a template of his own design—one that opted for a, shall we say, particular shade of institutional green. That design debuted in September 2003 and looked like this:

Year Two: 2004

By the following year, ReadWrite had added a right-hand column and a header bar that was, if anything, even greener than the previous design. Richard got top billing as producer, arranger, composer and designer of the site—fittingly, as it was still a one-man show at that point: 

Year Three: 2005

This design featured the first graphic element in the site's header—a thumbnail image of a work by conceptual artist John Baldessari, from his exhibition READ/WRITE/THINK/DREAM. Which, oddly enough, was not the inspiration behind ReadWrite's name (a story Richard tells here). The artwork suggests a rather literal interpretation of the "Write" portion—it basically consists of giant pencils.

Year Four: 2006

This design added the yin-yang symbol that would grace the site's header for the next five or so years, eliminated the left-hand column and introduced the red-and-white theme that has been a ReadWrite hallmark ever since.

Year Five: 2007

A further iteration of the previous template doubled down on the red theme and gave prominent placement to the site's sponsors in the right-hand column.

Year Six: 2008

A redesigned logo eliminated the slash between "Read" and "Write," while the design shrank down the text to a narrower left-hand column to make room for a central "Popular Posts" section.

Years Seven & Eight: 2009-2010

Mostly cosmetic changes included the introduction of share buttons in the header and a "Featured Posts" section following the first item on the page:

Year Nine: 2011

Additional minor tweaks expanded the "top story" across what had been a middle column and revised and enlarged the "featured posts" images and headlines.

Year Ten: 2012

Following the site's acquisition by Say Media, a full redesign introduced a much more visually oriented and editorially curated front page of top posts, followed by a reverse chronological listing of recent posts.

Year Eleven: 2013

Stay tuned — our next redesign is on its way.

If you are in the business of building and designing websites, you cannot ignore the fact that many people are going to be visiting your sites on their smartphones and tablets. The Web and the mobile browsers remain one of the top ways that users interact with websites and if they have trouble on their smartphone, there is a good chance they are not coming back.

That’s where responsive design can help.

Responsive design is a concept where you build your website once and then format it so it can adapt to any screen size that accesses it. Designers use HTML5 and CSS to build the sites and set parameters so the content will resize itself whether the user is in vertical or horizontal viewing mode, on a tablet, desktop or smartphone or even a screen as large as a television.

We employ responsive design here at ReadWrite. Go ahead, test it out. If you are on a PC browser, shrink or enlarge the window and watch the content respond. If you are on a tablet or smartphone, switch between portrait and landscape. 

See what happened? ReadWrite looks great no matter what size it is, no matter what device you are using.

Responsive design has been in vogue since about 2011. One of the first sites to employ it was The Boston Globe when it launched its new digital publication, BostonGlobe.com. 

“We are now looking at how we display and order content differently from screen size to screen size,” said Jeff Moriarty, Boston Globe VP of digital properties in an interview last year. “This ‘responsive content’ concept is emerging and we are starting to see in data that users want different types of content depending on their context and the device they are on. We have to now think about how content performs differently from the biggest screens to the smallest, how that content is organized and even how headlines are written from platform to platform.”

What’s The Best Way To Build A Responsive Website?

The first thing to think of when building a responsive site is simplicity. Web designers love to show off that they can design the hell out of a website. They fall in love with their code and all the cool things that it can do. 

“I think the challenge for me is to use it cautiously - and not try to be overly artsy with it,” said Ryan Light, a website designer working at CoachUp, a startup in Boston.

Light says that some website builders may over-design for the desktop, making some websites fun to play with but absolutely impossible to navigate.

“I find that a lot of people overdo it on their actual websites that are rendered in the browser,” Light said. “I find responsive design helpful for mobile browsing - but clumsy for Web typically.”

So designers, keep it simple.

Best Practices

There are a variety of ways to go about building a responsive website. French e-marketing company Splio aggregated some of the best practices in a very long infographic, shown below. 

The idea is to focus around content and avoid the pitfalls that certain aspects of websites can create. For instance, pictures and advertisements can be a problem.

Check out the infographic below. What is your approach to building a responsive site? Let us know in the comments. 

The Webby Awards have been celebrating the best on the Web since 1997. Like the Web, the Webby Awards have grown in size and stature in the last 16 years and are now considered the highest honor that a website can garner these days. The 17th annual Webby Awards will be given next week on April 9th. To commemorate another year, the Webby Awards teamed up with Internet Explorer to produce a graphic timeline of the Web, as told through Webby winners since 1997. If you have some time to burn, hop on over to the site and see how the Web has evolved since the days before the Dot Com Bubble to the Mobile Revolution.

Below, we took some of the best examples of how the Web has evolved since 1997. From SonicNet to TED Talks, the transformation of the Web from function to design has been remarkable.

1997

SonicNet

In 1997, the music industry was still healthy and churning out mega profits. Boy bands were the rage, Radiohead was coming into its own and Smashing Pumpkins was still together (they broke up and since have reformed). SonicNet won the Webby for Music that year and, well, it was 1997. The website itself was not much to look at but was considered a fairly high standard for the day.

Family Planet

Family Planet won the Home category for the Webby's in 1997 and it is perhaps the quintessential late 1990s website. Actually, it is quite a bit better than most late 1990s websites. You can start seeing some of the early design trends that would pervade the Web for years to come in Family Planet, with the three column layout and banner headline on the top.

2000

Thrive Online

By the time the new century rolled around, the Web started to look a little bit better than it had in the 1990s. Browsers were better and quality designers were buckling down on a more aesthetic Web. Then the Dot Com Bubble burst and many of those designers soon found themselves out of work. Thrive Online won the Health category in 2000 with a bold design, big fonts and front and center pictures.

Epicurious

Not everything was slick and trim in the year 2000. Epicurious won the Living category that year and was a jumbled mess. 2000 was still in the era of the Web when more was still thought of as, well... more. 

2003

PayPal

Following the aftermath of the Dot Com Bubble, the Web picked up its pieces and forged ahead. By the early-to-mid 2000s design and functionality started to meet in interesting and creative ways. PayPal, the payments service that not only survived the Dot Com era but came out so far ahead that its alumni are now considered a technorati mafia, was one of the websites on the forefront of function and design. PayPal won the Webby in 2003 for Financial Services.

Orisinal

Gaming and computers have always mixed. Who was a kid int he 1980s and did not play Oregon Trail or Carmen San Diego? By 2003, games on the Web were becoming big business and Orisinal was an original player providing cute animal-based games that proved to be the biggest time-suck ever. "Apple Season" was a favorite, where players tried to catch as many apples as possible. 

NASA

I am a proponent of giving NASA a lifetime achievement Webby just for being awesome. At a time when most government-run websites were husks of hyperlinks and text, NASA was pushing forward with visuals, videos and science. 

2006

Google Earth

If we were to break the first 20 years or so of the Internet into two epochs, the boundary line between the two would be Google's initial public offering in 2004. Since Google went public, the Internet has become faster, information has become easier to obtain and design has drastically increased. Google has had a large part to say in this. Google Earth won the Webby in 2006 for Best Design - Function. Google Earth made satellite imagery, once a curiosity for students and researchers, in the hands of anyone at had access to an Internet browser.

Flickr

Flickr won multiple Webby awards in 2006, including Best Practices and Best Navigation/Structure. If you can believe it, Yahoo was actually good at bringing quality websites to the masses once upon a time (Yahoo acquired Flickr from Ludicorp in 2005). Flickr was the photo sharing site in the mid-2000s and its mix of design and functionality was second to none. 

2009

The Turbo Gene Test

Turbo Gene Test was a website created for car company Saab. It was a bit of a marketing gimmick, but it was beautiful and portended a trend that we have seen a lot of since 2009: brands creating interesting websites to promote their business. It is no longer flashing banner ads and keyword search results. Turbo Gene Test won the Webby for Best Design - Aesthetic in 2009.

NikeID

Towards the latter half of the 2000s, the Web became more interactive. NikeID, the website for Nike's sensor-laden running show, was a great example of how brands and websites could show off their product in interesting visual and interactive fashions. NikeID won the Webby in 2009 for Best Design - Function. 

2010

Nike - A History Of Flight

Nike won another Webby in 2010 with Jumpman: A History of Flight. It was basically a way to show of Nike shoes through the years, especially those of basketball star Michael Jordan. The timeline-style website was informative, interactive and visually appealing. Nike might seem like an odd company to have such influence over the design of the Web, but it has proved multiple times that it can bring on the right people to implement creative new ideas to push boundaries. History of Flight won the Webby for Best Design - Aesthetics in 2010.

2011

TED Talks

TED Talks have become must-see Internet over the past couple of years. In 2011, the TED website won the Webby for Best Design - Function. TED has shown us new ways to think about live and how video communities live on the Internet. 

2012

Kinetic Fanzine No. 1

The Internet is now a place where anybody with a little imagination, a friend with design chops and maybe some rudimentary knowledge of coding can create a great website that is lightyears ahead of what was being produced in 1997. Kinetic Fanzine, which won for Best Design - Visual in 2012 is a great example of that.

Top image: National Film Board of Canada won for Best Photography in 2012

That joke speaks to us geeks who look beyond the "it just works" mentality, into something that approaches a harmony of function and purpose. And it's why I simply hate criticizing products that aspire to a higher form, just because something simpler, cheaper and more straightforward will do just as well.

Like the Chromebook Pixel.

Quite honestly, I feel guilty about panning the Pixel. As Dan Lyons notes, Google designers have quietly taken their efforts to another level. But, as virtually everyone who attended Google's Pixel press conference noted, the Pixel simply prices itself out of the game. For now, very little within Google's cloud - whether it be its 100,000 Stars app or the upcoming Photos enhancement - justifies the 2,560 x 1,700 multi-touch display, not to mention the $1,300 price tag. Google's Chromebook has established a niche as a wonderful companion PC or netbook: as long as you want to work on the Web, a $250 Chromebook fills the bill. So what the heck does anyone need Pixel for?

Still, there's so much in the Pixel that feels like an homage to notebooks I've loved before. On the outside, the Pixel is the aristocratic, well-bred child of a MacBook Air and the Lenovo ThinkPad: a solid, lightweight, rectangular slab of aluminum. A thin light bar on top glows blue when powered on, then cheekily flashes the Google rainbow as the lid closes. Google eliminated the icons on top of the I/O ports, correctly reasoning that most users would identify them by sight. No, there's no magnetic connector holding the power cord in, but a large LED glows yellow, then green, when the Pixel is fully charged. Vents push air to the side, somehow, presumably through the ports. The "piano hinge" attaching the display to the frame slowly glides shut. There's even a third microphone buried beneath the keyboard to eliminate typing noises during Hangouts.

And, of course, there's that jaw-dropping display. Don't be afraid about the Web moving to a touch model; I tried out Internet Explorer's showcase touch-enabled Web app, Contre Jour, and it runs just fine.

Google Is Not Alone

The Chromebook Pixel doesn't stand alone as an example of marvelously over-engineered hardware. Say what you want about Google's Nexus Q - as the odd hybrid of an audio amplifier and media player, the fact that it only played back YouTube and Google Play videos eventually doomed it. But from a hardware standpoint, the odd little sphere with the LED strip around its equator and an amplifier inside was a revolution, just one that failed.

I feel the same about the Lytro post-focusing camera, which many heralded as the evolution of consumer photography: terrific technology, but one that the world never needed. It didn't help that the first iteration of the product looked like a spyglass, contained a woefully inadequate LCD viewfinder, and required the photos to be stored on the company website for best effect. Lytro has its fans, but the company's status as the next "it" thing has long vanished.

Everyone has their favorite examples of well-designed, yet ultimately irrelevant technology; the $1,699 Hitachi IdeaCentre Horizon Table PC, for example, which doubles as a high-definition Monopoly table. The Microsoft Surface, possibly, a marvelous piece of hardware that still prices itself out of some tablet conversations. Some lumped Apple's "retina display" MacBook Pros into this category when if first came out, although over time the MacBook has developed a wealth of graphics apps supporting it that could help justify the high-resolution display.

(See also Apple's Brilliant Boondoggle: MacBook Pro Retina Display.)

When Technology Trumps Product

I don't review products for a living, but anyone who does do must constantly wrestle with a dilemma: How do you inform readers that a particular product may not be ready for prime time, but whose underlying technology is so innovative that it deserves commendation and even preservation? Two years ago, I wrote this piece about the Lytro, partly as a reaction to a generation of young bloggers who too-often seemed to naively accept the promise of any new technology.

These days, the tech press seems to revel in asking the tough questions. If anything, the press pendulum has swung back toward cynicism.

At the same time, though, crowdsourcing sites like KickStarter have become unabashed celebrations of entrepreneurship, bypassing the press to connect products directly with fans and backers.

That's a big difference: By exposing their plans and pricing, young start ups can work hand-in-hand with prospective customers. The risk of secrecy, as larger corporations sometimes discover, is that you can lose touch with the very customers you're trying to court. And end up with a powerful, beautiful but over-priced, over-engineered product that isn't well suited to meeting the needs of actual customers. 

It just hurts, sometimes, to have to be the one to break it to the folks who worked so hard to create something really cool that doesn't have a clear place in the world.

It was free, so of course I grabbed it, and I was shocked to see how perfect it was for my needs. How could the meditation apps on the store all be so bad except one, and that one happens to be free?

As it turns out, Mind was a simple labor of love with an atypical App Store story. It was built by Fred Oliveira, just @f on Twitter, a full-stack developer and designer. He's also an O'Reilly author and a mentor at 500 Startups. So I had to hear the rest of the Mind story.

"I built Mind mostly for myself," Oliveira says. "I looked around for a timer app (for meditation as well as a Pomodoro Technique tool) that was as simple as it could be. The App Store was packed with apps that looked bad, were poorly designed or were just too complex."

"So since building mobile and Web apps is what I do by trade, I just created my own."

Keep It Simple

Meditation apps are a funny category. App-making is a business. Meditation is a practice of letting go of busyness. These two drives come into conflict surprisingly often.

It's immediately obvious when a meditation app is just about making money; it costs too much for what it is (or it's free and full of distracting ads), and the design shows no care at all. There are plenty of apps in this category.

But even in the apps that are carefully designed, there's often a problem on the opposite extreme. In order to justify charging for such a simple app, many developers feel a need to pack in as many features as they can. These commonly include tons of configurable chime sounds; multiple presets for lengths of time; crazy, changing artwork; and even analytics of your meditation performance over time.

But these features actually detract from meditation apps even more than mere bad design does. The quality of the apps is higher, so it draws people in, but all the bells and whistles — especially the analytics — create pressure to do everything "properly," to make sure you don't miss your daily stats, to fiddle with the chime sounds, and otherwise be distracted from what should be the simplest of all activities.

"Meditation isn't about configuring a bunch of parameters. It's about sitting," Oliveira says. "I didn't need a complex UI, a number of buttons, to help me track how long I sit."

Mind Is A Tool

So Mind is the simplest meditation app it could possibly be, and that's why it works. It has one screen. You swipe the colored time slider left and right to set the duration anywhere between one minute and one hour. Then you hit the button, the app prompts you to relax and focus on your breathing, and when it's done, it chimes three times. It remembers your last session duration for next time. That's all there is to it.

My favorite thing about Mind is that even the imagery is minimal. Meditators come to the practice from different traditions and with different aesthetics, so apps that commit to a particular kind of Buddhist imagery — or worse, some kind of fake pastiche of New Age-y Zen/Hindu/Hippie fusion — are disturbing to me. Mind, from its name to its icon to its full-spectrum colors, is a simple foundation built for anyone.

"I never intended to make money from it," Oliveira says, "which is why it's free today and will probably stay that way forever. It was easy to build, and is easy to maintain. The emails and thanks I get from people who use it are payment enough, to be honest."

"I guess in the last few years I realized I'm a tool maker. Making tools is a calling. Mind is one of those tools. But I've built others before, and will continue building tools in the future. It makes me happy."

After Monday's big executive shakeup at the company, the interface design principles employed in the company's software is expected to take a new, more modernist turn. Progress is good, but Apple runs the risk of watering down some of the familiar appeal that makes their devices so easy to learn and use. 

Skewering Skeuomorphism

This design tactic, known as skeuomorphism, mimics familiar, real-world textures and objects in a digital interface. It's something for which Apple has become known - and sometimes ridiculed - for using in its apps and operating systems. The approach has long been championed by Scott Forstall, who was shown the door earlier this week. Forstall shared his affinity for these faux-analog details with Steve Jobs, whose death a year ago paved the way for the kind of sweeping changes recently undertaken by his successor, Tim Cook. 

Taking charge of the Human Interface group at Apple will be Jony Ive, the legendary hardware designer. Pretty much all of the company's most successful hardware products - the iPad, iPhone, MacBook Pro and iPod Touch, to name a few - came out of Ive's secret design lab in Cupertino. It's that type of minimal, no-frills design that many expect to see more of in OS X and iOS now that Ive is in charge. 

That means things like the stitched leather across the top of iCal and the faux notebook paper in Reminders could find their way out of OS X and iOS. Don't expect elements like this to be wiped out with the next OS upgrade, though. Apple's operating systems are used extensively by millions of people who have grown accustomed to how they look and work. If the skeuomorphic stuff is going to get axed, expect Ive and team to start by easout out the subtle details - the linen texture in the background of Notification Center, for example - replacing them one-by-one with cleaner designs that don't attempt to mimic things in the physical world. 

Why Skeuomorphism Isn't All Bad

There's been a bit of a backlash against skeuomorphic design elements lately, both within Apple and among designers generally. Designer Wells Riley has called it "the easy way out," charging that skeuomorphism 'helps people misunderstand the capabilities and limitations of digital products." Fast Company's Thomas Hobbs urges designers to move beyond the "silly" trend. 

There's certainly a case to be made that this type of thing should be used sparingly. Yet, at the same time, it's easy to see how weaving familiar-looking textures and objects into digital designs can help make new ways of doing things more palatable, especially to new users. 

"Skeuomorphism is about communicating and reinforcing feelings – getting an application to become a memorable experience, not just a tool," writes Tobias Bjerrome Ahlin, an interface designer at Spotify. "It’s about communicating the purpose of a UI, not only the functions it enables."

Skeuomorphism Has A Long History

Computers have borrowed visual conventions from the analog world for a long time. Since the dawn of personal computing, we have navigated through icons that mimic file folders, occasionally stuffing miniature pieces of paper into what looks like a tiny trash can. And yes, the calendar on my MacBook and iPad bears a resemblance to an actual, physical calendar.

In many cases, digital design that mimics analog artifacts can help foster a certain level of comfortable familiarity among consumers, who are spending more and more of their waking hours staring into screens. Maybe we actually need these familiar-looking things to be comfortable with embedding these devices this deeply into our lives.  

iPhones and iPads comprise the vast majority of revenue for what has become the most valuable company on the planet. They're clearly doing something right. It's hard to see how stripping out these vestiges of the physical world could help Apple do even better.

Yet Amazon has done quite well with its Kindle e-readers, which don't go quite as far as Apple's iBooks in mimicking paper books. And Microosft is drawing critical praise for the clean design of its Windows 8 interface, which makes few concessions to the past or the physical world. (It remains to be see how actual users will embrace the approach, however.)

The future may not lie squarely at either end of this debate. Perhaps it's somewhere in the middle, where digital interfaces borrow subtly from the real world, but continue to innovate and feely abandon skeuomorphs when they get in the way. 

At Apple, the visual language of iOS and OS X will continue to merge, possibly more rapidly than it already was. It seems clear that over time, it will have fewer accents of wood grain, stitched leather and fake glass. Will that make any difference? We're about to find out. 

Lead image of Jony Ive from Apple promotional video.

The GIF’s rise in prominence this election year even prompted PBS Ideas Channel host Mike Rugnetta to ask: How Will The Animated GIF Affect The Presidential Election?

Answer: The animated GIF's impact on this election - given its newness factor as a political tool - is slim or hard to gauge. “You’d probably be exaggerating... a lot” if you said GIFs will turn the tide one way or another, Rugnetta allows. But that’s not the point. The political GIF has already changed the way we talk about politics, how we cover politics, and even how we campaign as politicians. GIFs, like memes, are "The Way We Election Now." 

Critics of the political GIF could point out it further reduces a politicians message to soundbites, one-liners, gaffes and spectacle, but Rugnetta asserts “a GIF is more complete than quotes on paper, because the words are reunited with the actions and attitudes of the person who spoke them.”

“The time where there is an official campaign GIF maker doesn’t feel too far off,” Rugnetta speculates. As Colin Horgan wrote in The Guardian, “perhaps soon, a candidate could succeed or fail not on the strength of their zingers during a debate, but on the gifs they generate afterwards.”

You hear that, political campaign consultants? Animated political GIFs really could decide an election. 

Last week, a law student from the University of Texas in Austin leased a printer made by Stratasys, the uPrint SE 3D. He wanted it to create a prototype of a 3D-printable handgun. Turns out Stratasys didn't much like that idea, so it took back the printer, saying the student's lack of a firearms manufacturer's license made what he wanted to do illegal. (For more on this topic, see John Paul Titlow's story on How 3D Printing Is Inflaming The Gun Control Debate.)

A Reuters story , meanwhile, found that the European Union is asking member countries to invest in 3D printing technology to speed up and raise manufacturing output.

So just how hard is it for an average person get access to one and actually start making things? 

Why would you want a 3D printer, anyway? Because you can make just about anything with one. From utensils to iPhone cases and apparently weaponry, 3D printers can create just about anything your imagination (and a quality computer-aided drafting and design - CADD - software) can create. It's like an Easy Bake Oven for computer geeks.

How Much Do 3D Printers Cost?

Until fairly recently, 3D printers were available only to major industries to create prototypes or cheap and functional products. Now, anyone can get do-it-yourself 3D printing kits from sites like MakerBot for about $1,500.

If you want a more sophisticated machine, though, you'll probably have to deal with a sales rep. That's how Stratasys, the company currently embattled with the law student, sell its machines. The company offers leasing programs for its printers that range from $185/month to $299/month. If you wanted to buy one flat out with no leasing, you'd have to pony up about $10,000. Just this year, CNET reviewed three different types of consumer-available 3D printers that you can log on and buy, no sales rep needed, with prices ranging from $500 to $2,000. 

If you don't have a printer of your own, you can still get 3D models printed out through a service, kind of like a 3D version of FedEx Kinkos. Shapeways, a startup in New York, offers this service: just upload your model idea to the site, choose your materials, and Shapeways will give you a pricing estimate. Within a few weeks, the company will print it out and ship it to you. For particularly creative users who are good with software, the company offers product ideas that you can custom design and build.

How Do They Work?

The process these printers create models is fairly simple. Using a design from a CADD program, they turn 3D images into a series of thin, horizontal, virtual layers until a virtual version of what is to eventually be printed is modeled on screen. These CADD designs can be found online, or created by scanning a physical object. Designing complex objects from scratch requires a certain amount of skill and training.

Depending on the machine and the project, different materials can be used to construct the model. For the cheaper machines, plastic or resin is commonly used, while more industrial projects can employ powered metals, alloys or polycarbonate materials. There are even food-grade printers that use chocolate and sugar to create edible models.

Layer by layer, the machine lays the image out on to a heated platform. 3D systems at home printer Cube includes a platform glue that keeps the base of the project steady during printer and washes off with water. Once it's printed and cooled, you'll have a tactile version of something that used to just occupy space in your head. 

If you are itching to print something, but are not particularly creative, a site from Makerbot, Thingiverse can offer up a few ideas. The open-source community has instructions on how to print your own products (like these functional headphones that made tech bloggers drool a few days ago) and provides an overall glimpse into the world of 3D printing and creativity.

Minecraft creator Mojang announced yesterday in a blog post that it is teaming up with United Nations Habitat to upgrade 300 public spaces by 2016.  

The project, called Block by Block, enlists local youth to improve their neighborhoods. Block by Block is the international version of a previous Mojang project known as My Blocks (Mina Kvarter in Swedish), organized in conjunction with Swedish Building Services. Mojang managing director Carl Manneh wrote:

“It has proven to be a great way to visualize urban planning ideas without necessarily having architectural training. The ideas presented by the citizens lay as a ground for political decisions. Mina Kvarter has been a great success and it’s spreading into more areas in Sweden. It has also been recognized internationally as a new way to do urban development planning. Recently, the UN found out about what we are doing and we got together to talk.”

The first Block by Block site, in Nairobi, Kenya, is “already in the planning phase.” Urban planners interested in following the project will have to wait for status updates, as Mojang is still building the Block by Block website.

Gold: The New York Times

The New York Times Olympics website is as sleek and good looking as an American track athlete. The site is a compelling combination of facts and figures, news analysis, interactive graphs and multimedia (video and photos). It's also beautifully laid out, with clear navigation. Not only did the NYT build an Olympics site for itself, it partnered with Reuters to syndicate the data and content to other publications.

A highlight of the NYT website is its data-based graphics. Here's an example from the 400m freestyle swimming race, won by China's Sun Yang:

It's a relatively simple graph showing when Yang won the race (the last quarter). Below that is a geographical view of previous winners of this event. I was able to click on my country, New Zealand, to see Danyon Loader's name pop up for 1996. Although I was unable to click on Loader's name - or Yang's for that matter - to find out more details about the swimmer.

Here's another example, which is more in-depth. It's a bubble-based view of the medal table.

Hover over a country and you see its medal tally. Click on it and the data underneath the graph changes to show all of that country's medal results.

Silver: The Guardian

Just about anything the Guardian does on the Web is innovative and polished - and its Olympics coverage has been no exception. The NYT seemed slightly more satisfactory to us in terms of breadth and depth of stories, and ability to move around the site, but the Guardian does have some outstanding features. In particular, a "second screen" subsite.

It's a browser website, but it works best on a tablet. The idea is to offer real-time information - news, statistics, photos, tweets and more - on your tablet device while you watch the Olympics on TV. Very handy!

Like the NYT, the Guardian makes a good attempt at offering interactive data services. For example, a daily updated Olympic medal table ranked by GDP, population and team size.

The New Zealand team ranked third, by population. That's something for this author to be proud of.

Bronze: BBC

The host nation's public broadcaster, the BBC, has been widely praised for its television coverage. There are up to 24 live channels devoted to the Olympics at any one time. As for its website, the coverage is solid - if unspectacular. There is plenty of Olympics news and photos, with a bias towards Team Great Britain (as to be expected with any national publication).

One of the more interesting features is the BBC's Event Guides.

These guides not only explain the various Olympics sports - very helpful for sports like fencing and equestrian, which only enthusiasts follow outside of the Olympics - but they encourage you to give the sports a go yourself.

Runners-Up

The Official London 2012 Olympics Website

While not a media website per se, the London 2012 Olympics website is a good place to get the latest news and photos. It features Facebook integration, including the dreaded frictionless sharing ("Your friends will see the articles you've read and the events you've celebrated."). The official site has been active too on its Facebook and Twitter accounts - we've noticed athletes re-tweeting the official account a lot.

The Telegraph

The British daily has a comprehensive website, including some interesting infographics.

USA Today

USA Today brings its trademark strengths of storytelling and explanatory graphics to the Olympics, with an informative website. We recommend you check out the interactive section.

NBC

NBC's Olympics website was the place to go for American viewers who wanted to watch the Olympics live. Alternatively people could access live coverage online in other, sometimes less legal, ways. Apart from the live video though, NBC's website is solid but unexciting.

ESPN

ESPN has a nice collection of video commentaries and written opinion pieces, if you can stand the eye-scorchingly bright red background of its Olympics subsite.

Yahoo

Yahoo's coverage is fine, but there are better places to get your Olympics news and results. It does though have some useful athlete profiles, along with a sappy "Team Mom" section (featuring interviews of mothers of athletes).

Reuters

Reuters has a standalone website, in addition to partnering with the NYT. Its own website is well designed, but seems devoid of the personality of other media sites.

Of course there are many other media websites out there which have good coverage of the Olympics. If we missed your favorite, please add it to the comments!

See also: Social Olympics: Does The Gold Medal Go To Facebook, Twitter or Google+?

Kim's post is a visual critique of Microsoft's corporate spirit as it is today. In a scrolling essay of bold images and few words, he tears down Microsoft's stale image and unfurls a rebel's banner of fresh ideas across the company's present and future product lines.

The company has been struggling to recapture its former glory, and its current strategy is failing. Kim's critique reveals some telling reasons why that might be and proposes a way out.

Kim’s post raises deep questions about what tech customers want and whether Microsoft (or its competitors) is giving it to them. We asked him some of these questions, and here’s what he said.

ReadWriteWeb: The aesthetics of Microsoft’s Surface presentation were striking. Where does your concept deviate from what they showed at the Surface launch, with the lasers, Tron colors, techno music and all that?

Andrew Kim: Any change is welcome with Microsoft at this point. My design deviates from their video in that it takes a more surreal and quiet science-fiction approach rather than exploding in your face with anger. I took inspiration from my obsession, Stanley Kubrick's film "2001: A Space Odyssey."

RWW: You draw a contrast to the friendliness of Apple's and Google’s brands. Do you think Microsoft’s post-Surface messaging is particularly friendly or unfriendly? Or is their attitude ambiguous?

Andrew Kim: I don’t think we can decide what their approach is just yet, because the Surface is still largely unknown to the general public. I would wait until the introduction of Windows 8 to see if Microsoft is taking a new stance, in terms of its branding position. I predict they’ll take a more Cupertino approach.

RWW: It seems as though you like Microsoft’s purely digital metro aesthetic, but you mentioned that the color choices are questionable. Color was an important part of the Surface presentation. What’s wrong with Microsoft’s colors?

Andrew Kim: Microsoftian colors are incredibly bright, primary and almost childish in color. Nothing wrong with that, but the company would benefit from a more sophisticated, less obvious color scheme. Metro is great, but the colors make me feel like I’m looking at something unfinished.

RWW: You said that you want this brand to be “about the future.” Describe that future - not just for Microsoft, but for the world around the Microsoft you’ve envisioned.

Andrew Kim: As a product designer, I see a future with more products that are efficient, purposeful and honest in their function. Like Apple products of today.

Peruse the rest of Andrew Kim's striking images of The New Microsoft on his site, Minimally Minimal. Especially if you work for Microsoft.

Do you covet the new retina MacBook Pro? That screen has to be seen to be believed. With an ultra-high resolution and millions of pixels, it needs a worthy wallpaper to look as stunning as possible. Here are the best places we've found to download desktop backgrounds and other visual candy that can do justice to that 15-inch 2880-by-1800 resolution display.

Read more: Apple’s New MacBook Pro Is the Best Laptop You Can Buy - But You Probably Shouldn’t Buy One

RWW's Eliot Weisberg shares his impressions of the MacBook Pro with Retina display.

InterfaceLIFT is a long-standing wallpaper site with a great selection, and it now has retina-ready options.

WallpapersWide.com is one of the best and broadest retina wallpaper sites we've found. It has tons of categories and thousands of pages to choose from.

WallpaperFX also has a well-organized selection. Here's its 2880x1800 retina display section.

Here's an entire site dedicated to high-resolution wallpapers of varying quality.

If you already have a MacBook Pro with Retina display, you've already got these, but here are Apple's retina-sized Mountain Lion wallpapers.

Tomas Laurinavicius has a great blog post of 40 very high-resolution wallpapers to peruse.

And we found two retina-ready Flickr galleries that will probably be of interest:

• Space photos
• Marvel Vs. Capcom 3 wallpapers

And, of course, you can always search Google for Retina display MacBook Pro images.

These aren't exactly wallpaper, but we found an amazing gallery of Renaissance paintings in super-duper-high-definition that is a great way to show off the new machine's visual excellence.

Finally, check out this gorgeous, navigable 26-gigapixel image of Paris. If you go full-screen, you can grab whatever part you want for a retina background.

How To Set Your Wallpaper

Once you find a hi-res image you like, you can crop or resize it in Preview (the built-in imaging application) to 2880-by-1800 pixels. Just make sure the image you're starting with is bigger than that, because increasing the size of the image will make it look nasty on that Retina display. If you don't want to bother cropping, you can also just set larger images as "centered" when you select your wallpaper in your Desktop & Screen Saver system preferences.

Responsive Roundup

You're probably familiar with the typical "waterfall" process: start with strategy, then onto design, followed by front- and back-end development and finally analytics implementation. The main attribute of the waterfall process is its linear nature: once a stage ends, the next one begins with a near-perfect dovetail. The progression through the stages only goes in a single direction, and unfortunately as problems accumulate, they inevitably flow downhill and changes are not handled very gracefully.

Waterfall process:

If you’re unfamiliar with the term "responsive Web design", it describes a website-building process that utilizes the same set of code to display properly on desktop, tablet and smartphone browsers. Gone are the days of creating entirely separate websites in parallel desktop and mobile versions. Now you can construct an extremely flexible website to handle all environments.

Responsive approach:

So why implement responsive design over the waterfall process? One of the biggest disadvantages of the waterfall is that little thought is given to design and development for environments beyond the standard desktop browser. An agile approach with responsive design considers these issues from the start, but will require more upfront wireframing, design and testing that are omitted in the waterfall process. Once implemented, your site will render properly on desktops, mobile devices and tablets.

Responsive approach:

So how can you implement responsive Web design in your organization? Below we’ll review the steps of the typical waterfall process and explain how they can become responsive.

How to Implement Responsive Web Design

Step 1: The Plan

Waterfall Process

In the waterfall process, wireframes are built and consist primarily of layouts and widgets. They’re set to a specific size (usually pixel-based), and have little room for flexibility. These wires promote very specific grid/layout sizes, but when the layout changes due to different screen resolutions, things will shift in transit. The results are that navigation menus become unusable, forms become inaccessible and your interface is rendered inadequate.

Responsive Web Design

The fix for this problem isn't so difficult. You’ll need to design widgets for different views, and not think of a page as a "page." Pages are not atomic units - instead, the sliders, content, forms and other components are atomic pieces making up the whole. Wireframes must represent different screen sizes, and therefore layouts must be fluid. They can go from three columns to two, and perhaps scale down into a single column for the smallest displays (mobile smartphones).

You’ll need to change the user experience as well - a slider cannot only be controlled by a mouse, but might require a user’s finger for interaction on smaller screen sizes. Wireframes need to become prototyping tools rather than blueprints, and some development and testing is needed to ensure they’re fully functional across the display spectrum. If design commences prior to this initial testing, then unknown development issues may arise at a later point. Regardless, the ultimate vision for the project must be sustained, so keeping lines of communication open between departments is essential.

Step 2: Design Time

Waterfall Process

In the waterfall process, the next step would be handing off the wireframes to design, and breathing life into them via fonts, colors, spacing and other tools of the craft. Oftentimes, there is some back and forth on design direction, with updates to the design comps made as more knowledge about the brand and its design guidelines surface.

Responsive Web Design

To make better use of allotted project time and resources, design should include a few layouts and widgets at different sizes. Responsive Web design means letting go of pixel-perfect designs. Making those designs work on desktop browsers is challenging enough, but when we think in terms of flexible widgets on a flowing grid, the number of designs needed becomes manageable.

Let the medium of HTML enhance the qualities of the design using a fluid layout in all environments. Creating the states for each browser width is a huge waste of time - instead focus on the totality of the user experience. For example, ensure that the atomic components of a rotating banner are touch-sensitive on smaller mobile devices, and use an industry-recommended minimum size of 44 pixels to allot for the typical human fingertip size. The design of the experience is just as important as the look of the site on all screen sizes.

Step 3: Build It

Waterfall Process

With the waterfall approach, once the designs are approved by the client, front-end development ensues where issues regarding rendering on smaller screens could arise. Unfortunately, due to the linear nature of the waterfall, these unforeseen problems appear well into the project progression.

Responsive Web Design

In our agile and responsive process, the design must live on a flexible grid. The widgets need to be planned out and prototyped by the developers, and they need to be tested along the way. The code also needs to be optimized to ensure that the widgets are the smallest possible unit. The widgets can be easily inserted and removed from layouts that were not originally planned for, and testing these options grants peace of mind. Constant collaboration between the developer, designer and strategist circumvents issues with the inevitable changes. With the different members of the team on the same page, problems are identified and resolved earlier in the process.

Step 4: Testing Your Patience

Waterfall Process

The final stage in a standard waterfall process is to evaluate the site via unit and functional testing methods. Issues discovered at this stage may require the original vision to be tempered, and sometimes a new device that’s just hit the market can throw a wrench in the works. The strategy and design team members, who may have begun work on new projects, must be brought back in the loop to accommodate these changes, and more time must be spent on updates.

Responsive Web Design

In the responsive process, you need to test along the way on multiple browsers and screen sizes so any problems are revealed early on. Issues with the mobile environment, which don’t coincide with the wireframes, can be recognized, as well as the capabilities of the design on a number of different platforms. A working project prototype will be ready early on allowing clients to review sooner, making it a win-win for all parties.

Step 5: Rinse, Lather, Repeat

Waterfall Process

The traditional waterfall process doesn’t have a step where you iterate through the designs and the interface. Passing over minor details at certain stages of the project construction permits issues to arise and client-expectation conflicts. Despite consistent and timely communication with the client, until a presented working model is shown, the full gravity of these accumulated poor decisions is not known.

Responsive Web Design

With the responsive approach, the same amount of progress is attained and, as a bonus, there is live code for client presentation every step of the way. The discoveries made at these earlier stages will help drive subsequent stages and anticipate critical changes ahead of any deadlines.

In Summary

Adopting an agile responsive approach will free you from the constraints of the waterfall process. Your design and development will be streamlined, you’ll be more productive and efficient and your online brand presence will be maximized on all possible platforms and screens. The real challenge is breaking out of the waterfall mold and becoming a responsive organization. Follow these five steps and you might just say "bye, bye" to the waterfall and "hello" to responsive Web design.

Waterfall photo courtesy of Shutterstock.

Unsurprisingly, iOS apps are very well represented in this list. Apple's design philosophy is highly regarded and many of its apps are similarly beautiful. That said, if you have a favorite lovely app on Android, Windows Mobile or another OS, please note it in the comments. In no particular order, here are our selections:

1. Flipboard

Showed the way for glorious design on the iPad. Even better now that it's been enhanced for the high-definition retina display of iPad 3!

2. Jux

The pretty version of Tumblr. Jumbo pictures and large fonts abound.

3. Tweetbot

iPhone Twitter client "with a lot of personality."

4. Paper

Drawing tool for iPad, with an appealingly simple UI.

5. The Verge

Tech blog launched on the premise of a new kind of design for blogging. It's colorful and fun.

6. Wunderkit

Personal project management tool, available as a desktop app for Mac OSX or an iPhone app.

7. Newsify

Mobile app for Google Reader (iOS).

8. Art.sy

New art social network, currently in private beta. I'm still drooling over its HD images of art.

9. 500px

Could this be the next big photo sharing service, after Flickr and Instagram? It's certainly nice to look at.

10. Remodelista

OK this is very biased, as Remodelista is a sister site of ReadWriteWeb - via our parent company SAY Media. But check out the design, because ReadWriteWeb is getting this too... soon ;)

Image credit: Shutterstock

They especially love designing pages, a pizza-fueled event that is repeated on nine Wednesday nights each semester. "Why?" I all but scream at them. "It's a skill that isn't going to matter in another couple of years!"

That's a tough admission for a lifetime newspaper junkie who still insists that two stacks of dead trees be dumped on my doorstep every Sunday morning. I thought I was older and wiser, and that I was, sadly, right. But after spending the weekend playing around with the Boston Globe's new iPad app, it turns out I may need to learn a thing or two from the kids.

The Globe is my hometown newspaper, the paper that made me fall in love with print journalism as an 11-year-old when I learned there was a world beyond the comics and sports pages. And, by way of full disclosure, I was able to fulfill a lifelong dream, writing regularly for the paper's business desk between April 2008 and January 2011. That was when even I, one of the last holdouts, had to concede the future for newspapers wasn't bright.

The Globe is also owned by The New York Times, which has its own slick iPad app. It looks and feels like a Web page and makes use of stunning video and photos. Sharing articles on Twitter, Facebook and email is easy and, because it is, after all, The New York Times, I just assumed that it would be the standard all papers would live up to.

Don't Retrain Page Designers Yet

The Globe, however, has gone in a different direction, essentially reproducing print pages in the iPad app. At first glance it looked archaic, like PDFs crammed into a too-small screen. But within seconds, intuition took over, and I quickly saw there was tons of functionality. I could zoom into articles and, once I clicked onto one I wanted to read, the reading interface was more like the eye-friendly Web page The Times delivers.

I can share articles on social media as easily as I can on The Times iPad app, but the Globe offers an added layer of interaction: a thumbs up, thumbs down button where I can register whether I agree or disagree with the article. I'm not sure how far the interaction will go, but it seems like a step in the right direction toward engaging readers.

Online, the Globe moved premium content behind a paywall last year. Casual readers can still access lots of free content (and lots of teasers for paid content) at boston.com, but the premium stuff lies behind the paywall at BostonGlobe.com (as a Sunday print subscriber, I get access to the premium site and the iPad app, even though the weekly Sunday print subscription is cheaper than the weekly online rate).

Having worked with many of the photographers who were learning how to shoot videos, I hope a lot of that video content makes it onto the iPad app. I didn't see any in the seven issues I read during the weekend, but it makes sense that it will end up on the iPad, and if I did have a complaint about the new iPad app, it would be that it still feels a little too much like a newspaper and not the multimedia-storytelling platform that it is.

Which is Better?

Here's my big problem: I love both apps. They both offer something unique in terms of reader experience. Most importantly, they deliver news in a way that is usable, which hasn't always been the case with their online cousins.

But - and this may be my antiquated bias to ink showing through - if I had to choose, I give the nod to the Globe. The reason is simple: I feel smarter after reading a newspaper cover to cover, as it exposes me to all sorts of articles I may not have read if I hadn't scanned the headline.

Eli Pariser's The Filter Bubble has its fair share of critics, but there's something to be said about the Internet only exposing us to news and content we're already interested in, as opposed to content and news we should be interested in.

The Globe iPad app, which lets me sweep through the pages like a traditional newspaper, does a better job of giving me a balanced news diet - without the hassle of getting ink stains on my finger tips.