Inspired by the cool videos from Make magazine, here is a simple idea for making a sugar sprinkler. All you need is a nice bottle and a bottle pourer.

you once said that it is your dream to make the world a better place... is it beauty you are looking for?

no, not for beauty. we have to replace beauty, which is a cultural concept, with goodness, which is a humanist concept.

the beauty of intelligence?

yes. of intelligence. the elegance of intelligence and the beauty of happiness.

Read the whole interview over at designboom

There are a few design blogs which I follow on a daily basis. Since I recommended them to quite a few people and got a lot of positive feedback it is time to post them here as well.

Swiss Miss - An interesting blog from a designer living in NYC. She posts a lot of interesting stuff and I especially like the variety of articles: video clips, traditional art, typography, product design,... The only problem I have is that some days there are just too many new posts.

Inhabitat - This blog is about environmental friendly design and new innovative approaches of solving traditional problems. Most of the work they present is truly inspiring.

Yesterday I launched the new visual design of this site which is quite an improvement compared to the old one.

I had a lot of fun building it and want to share my inspirations and design process. While thinking about a new design I wanted to maintain the 3D look of the old website. When I visited a design exhibition in Sydney I stumbled over the husque bowl.

I was impressed by its shape, strong lines and the simple color palette and decided to base my next design on a similar shape. The next step was finding a good color palette. I wanted to use natural colors so I looked at my New Zealand pictures for inspirations. This turned out very well and in the end all the colors on this site were extracted from this picture.

The backend has been greatly improved, too. The old site used tables for the layout which resulted in bloated html. The new design is based solely on div and css magic. The result is less html code, faster load and rendering times and improved maintainability. Furthermore the new design renders correctly on all important browser: Internet Explorer, Firefox and Safari. Something which I was never able to achieve with the old design.